Can Star Wars: Rogue One Survive Darth Vader’s Death Grip?

By now, the origin of Rogue One is something of a folk legend among die-hard Star Wars fans. Visual effects guru John Knoll—both a veteran Lucas employee and a life-long fan of the Skywalker family drama—pitched Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy his idea of a movie centering on a ragtag group of rebels stealing the plans for the Death Star. And Kennedy went for it. Like directors J.J. Abrams and Gareth Edwards, Knoll is part of a new age of Lucasfilm—now completely independent of its founder, George Lucas, and owned by Disney—where the franchise is being shaped by Star Wars fans, for Star Wars fans.

Knoll’s initial conceit for this intergalactic heist—which takes place after Revenge of the Sith and just before A New Hope—was impressively unshackled from homages to the Star Wars he grew up with. Darth Vader had no lines; the Force was barely mentioned. In the version of Rogue One that opens this Friday, though, Vader dominates two scenes, and the Force—though largely dormant in the galaxy—sneaks its way in, too. If the considerable difference between footage found in the trailers and what appears in the final cut of the film is any indication, it’s not just Knoll’s vision that got altered along the way. Director Gareth Edwards, who once described Rogue One in terms of a war movie, has clearly made some compromises as well, possibly owing to the reportedly extensive reshoots he’s been constantly forced to address on the film’s promotional circuit. The Lucasfilm Cinematic Universe is taking shape in the shadow of fellow Disney property Marvel, which has had massive financial success in creating interlocking films that are less stand-alone than parts of a larger whole; Lucasfilm, too, seems to be working to make films, TV shows, comic books, and toys that exist together in one coherent universe. (Disney declined to comment on its overall plan for shaping the Star Wars franchise.)

So what defines a Star Wars film in this seemingly freer era of spin-offs and comic twists? The answer, as indicated by Rogue One, may be the same as it was in the age of George Lucas: an over-dependence on the past.

Rogue One is at its best when divorced almost entirely from the main Skywalker saga. Alongside a striking visual style, Edwards and credited screenwriters Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy at times deliver a downright inspirational story of the ragtag team of rebels who defied the Empire in order to steal plans for the original Death Star. That their mission requires a good deal of sacrifice should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with A New Hope, but the unflinching bravery with which Rogue One addresses the price of war makes it truly stand out in an already impressive new franchise. Even the delightfully dour robot K-2SO, voiced by _Alan Tudyk, feels like a much more nuanced take on a classic Star Wars staple: the droid sidekick.

The movie opens on a scene that feels unlike anything we’ve ever known in the Star Wars universe. Cloaks flap loudly in gusty, rainy wind as two actors at the top of their game—Ben Mendelsohn and Mads Mikkelsen—infuse a discussion of the Empire and Rebellion with weighty personal drama. It feels wholly fresh and wonderful. But by the time Vader shows up, the history of the Star Wars franchise already makes the rebels’ story feel crowded.

In Knoll’s original pitch, Darth Vader was only a shadow glimpsed in the periphery. The expansion of the role, as Knoll argued in an interview at Skywalker Ranch during the film’s press junket, is relatively minor, but it allowed Disney and Lucasfilm to make Vader’s familiar, helmeted face the largest one on the Rogue One poster, a significant part of the trailers, and landed good old Anakin the cover of Entertainment Weekly.

Courtesy of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures/Lucasfilm.

And, as Edwards explained, there were plenty of thematic opportunities for the idea of Vader to emerge without literally including him. Felicity Jones’s Jyn Erso is grappling with her own Dark Father—Imperial scientist Galen Erso (Mikkelsen)—and like Luke Skywalker’s, her journey is as much about redeeming her father’s legacy as it is about saving the galaxy. “We tried to get similar themes and similar ideas in our film, but in a kind of inverted flipped way. There’s the grayness of ‘Is he good, is he bad?’ Jyn remembers him as this great father, but he’s done this terrible thing.”

Vader only has about two scenes in Rogue One, but in the first of them, his long shadow literally (and metaphorically) engulfs Mendelsohn’s bad guy, Orson Krennic, who is one of the most deliciously nuanced villains of the franchise. Unlike Vader, the Emperor, and even The Force Awakens’s Kylo Ren, Krennic isn’t vicious because some external, mysterious Dark Side has made him that way. He’s simply a human consumed by ambition.

Edwards compares Mendelsohn’s white-caped Imperial officer to Steve Jobs. He’s gathered the brightest and the best minds to create the ultimate bit of technology: the Death Star. And Vader’s cartoonish villainy clashes harshly with Mendelsohn’s sly, subtly grasping performance that, Edwards says, is based on the class difference between Krennic and his high-born fellow officers. A classic Vader pun—“Don’t choke on your own ambition,” while force throttling Krennic—may have worked beautifully in the sometimes-cheesy original trilogy, but feels woefully out of place here.

Even more out of place? An attempt to resurrect another original trilogy villain via C.G.I. technology that’s not quite there yet moves the nostalgia push from ill-advised straight into the heart of the uncanny valley.

Knoll’s original pitch for Rogue One had limited Vader, but had no use of the Force, the mystical presence in the Star Wars universe that powers those acrobatic lightsaber fights and Jedi mind tricks. Rogue One presents a world of moral ambiguities, with villains like Krennic and heroes like Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor, who compromises his values for the greater good of the rebellion. But when the Force is introduced, it becomes harder for the film to deal in shades of gray.

Rogue One takes place during a fallow time for the Force. Thanks to Imperial dominance, Jedi such as Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda (and even more, if you watch the animated series Rebels) are in hiding. But Rogue One gets around that restriction by introducing Donnie Yen’s blind warrior monk, Chirrut. He may fight with a bow staff instead of a lightsaber, but the character is Force sensitive, just like Luke and Obi-Wan, and is gifted with foresight. His mantra—“The Force is with me, and I am one with the Force”—is repeated ad nauseam throughout the film, ensuring we won’t forget the mystical nature of this universe.

“There aren’t any places in the film where major plot points or action is resolved by someone using the Force,” Knoll says to explain the Force’s presence in a story that, initially, wasn’t built for it. “It really is more a story of ordinary citizens being brave and heroic in this time of repression.” But as you might imagine, Chirrut’s ability to sense danger and dark energy is enormously useful to the rebels and, at one crucial moment, his Force-happy mantra seems to render him bulletproof.

Edwards was hired after reading Knoll’s Force-free pitch for Rogue One, but says now, “I couldn't imagine making a Star Wars film that doesn’t have the Force in it.” Likening the franchise to a biblical epic, he explains, “It’s hard to make that without referencing religion, and the Force is the religion of Star Wars. We knew we couldn’t have a Jedi exactly, but what we could have is the belief system, and so we have the characters travel through Jedha, which is the mecca or Jerusalem of the Jedi. Having the visuals of this ancient holy city with a giant Star Destroyer above it felt really right. That took nine months to get to. That was not in the first few versions that we played with.”

But the presence of the Force—something that drives Jyn as well via a kyber-crystal necklace from her dead mother—contrasts sharply with Edwards’s attempt to tell a different kind of morality tale. One that we get occasional glimpses of in the final Rogue One product, and might better suit our complicated times than the original trilogy.

“We tend to want to put people in boxes and say, ‘You’re good, you’re evil,’ and no one really is evil, and so in our version of Star Wars, we’ve muddied it a lot more,” Edwards says of heroes like Jyn, villains like Krennic, and the complicated figures like Galen caught between them. “I think that reflects a more true understanding of the world that we have today versus decades ago.” When Edwards makes that movie—one that is not about the dark side or the light but, as he puts it, “the gray side”—that’s when Rogue One really sings.